Hare joins the LA circus

10 April 2012

The playwright Sir David Hare, up for his first Oscar for his screenplay of The Hours, gives a bark of laughter when asked about his plan for Oscar night.

"Plan? I don't have a plan! I think we'll be lurching in despair or triumph from one party to another. I've no idea if I'll win or what I'll say if I do. But it's very flattering and incredibly scary, and I can't pretend I don't care if I win or lose.

Everyone does. When Stanley Kubrick died, The New York Times's headline was: 'Filmmaker who never won an Oscar dies'. This is the man who made Dr Strangelove and Paths of Glory. I've no idea why the Oscars exert this extraordinary hold on the imagination, but they do."

For the past few months Hare has been commuting to and from LA almost weekly for award ceremonies - The Hours has been picking up prizes everywhere. "I've literally been back and forth and back and forth, and I've eaten a lot of chicken dinners," he observes rather wearily from his London studio, where he is pausing briefly before trekking back to Heathrow. "This weekend it was something called the Scripter Award, which is usually called the ' prestigious Scripter Award'. It's very rare for an arthouse film to reach the shopping malls like this has, and it's fantastic: I don't suppose there's been a British film that has had this impact since The English Patient.

But as regards the Oscars, I'm glad to be part of this circus this year, it's delightful, but not the be all and end-all of my life. I'm 55 and it's a bit late to have my head turned."

Still, it's not bad for the boy from Bexhill, East Sussex, whose father, a purser with P and O, was away 11 months of the year. He escaped his miserable childhood by excelling at Cambridge. Now he is one of Britain's most talented living playwrights and has been married for 10 years, glamorously, to fashion designer Nicole Farhi. So he needn't worry what to wear on the big night? "I'm wearing a dinner jacket, like every other idiot. But it's from her shop." He giggles. "I try to keep the side up."

The Hours, starring Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore and Meryl Streep, is up for nine nominations, including Best Actress for Kidman, Best Director for Stephen Daldry, Best Adapted Screenplay for Hare and Best Picture.

It is the blockbuster the playwright always longed for, and the irony is he almost turned it down. "I had made so many films and I was exhausted," he says. "I was only interested in making arthouse movies, and you have to face the fact that it takes three years of work and it's on for two weeks at the Curzon Soho. So I found the cinema heartbreaking: I hadn't written a screenplay in 10 years."

But the producer, Scott Rudin, and his agent twisted his arm to adapt Michael Cunningham's novel about three women linked by Virginia Woolf 's stream-of-consciousness-novel Mrs Dalloway.

Hare says he has not been "surprised by its success in the sense that, like all people in this line of work, it always seems to me that what I'm interested in, everybody else is. I think there's a thirst for more serious fare at the cinema. And it's about women's lives in a way that isn't condescending."

He is "more open" to movies as a result of its triumph. "But it's a tremendous commitment," he laments tiredly. "There's not a day in the past three and a half years when I haven't worked on The Hours."

Of his three stars, Hare is in awe of Streep and Moore. "I mean, Nicole's wonderful," he says. "She's a fantastic trier. She's game, and that sounds as if I mean she doesn't succeed, when she does. But Julianne Moore and Meryl Streep have both been recognised as great actresses and have the confidence that comes of that. Nicole is much more somebody with something to prove, that she isn't a pretty face, so I think she has less confidence in her own powers."

Hare, by contrast, seems at the peak of his career. In the past five years everything the self-lacerating and sensitive playwright has written has won rave reviews. First Kidman electrified London as "pure theatrical Viagra" in his play, The Blue Room.

Then Via Dolorosa, his 90-minute monologue on the turmoil in the Middle East, which he performed himself, reinvented his career. Now The Hours is likely to sweep the board at the Oscars, and The Breath of Life, his play about a jilted wife and mistress, has been extended twice on a sell-out run in London after uniting the two Dames, Judi Dench and Maggie Smith, in a piece of theatrical history.

The writer is currently adapting The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen's literary bestseller about three dysfunctional Midwestern children under pressure to go home for Christmas. He groans miserably when I say it is my favourite book. "Don't tell me that! It's got too much stuff in it! How you can reduce it to two hours, when it has so much wonderful material, I don't know. I'm a year into it already. And I have a play coming up at the National by the Out of Joint theatre company about the privatisation of the railways." A good subject. "Yes, the story is so extraordinary it tells itself."

In a few days he may well have added the crowning chapter to his own.

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